York students achieve national success with one-take videos

Two one-take, one minute videos produced and filmed by York students have become a national success this week after achieving over a million hits in the first month on YouTube, and appearing on both ITV Calendar and GMTV.

Third-year students Will Tribble, Rocco Sulkin and Joe Burgess, through the University of York Filmmaking Society, used the football pitch outside the sports centre to film their one-take reconstruction of the famous Forrest Gump storyline, detailing Forrest’s turbulent life from serving in the Vietnam War to becoming a dad, all in one minute. Tribble says: “We decided on Forrest Gump because he spends so much of the film running, so it just made sense to show him running constantly for a minute.”

Following its appearance on YouTube, the video was then mentioned on Lorraine Kelly’s GMTV show last week. Kelly enthused that the video is “so good” and that she is “liking it very much.”

After the YouTube success of the Forrest Gump spoof, Tribble went on to film a one-minute take-off of both Kill Bill 1 & 2 in just one minute, using props such as a cardboard coffin and car. Tribble has pledged to produce more of the spoofs after a “hiatus of about six weeks”, once he and his co-producers have completed dissertations. He commented that: “After the holidays we’re going to make at least one more, then move on to something else. It’s a shame, because I genuinely enjoy making these and would love to make more, we’re just running out of university time when we’ll all go our separate ways.”

Tribble describes YouTube’s reaction to the video as “mental” but that he’s not sure why. He feels that “this is only a fifteen minutes of fame deal, and that all the views will disappear as soon as I put up something that isn’t simultaneously ripping off a slightly too long film and an idea by Michel Gondry, but I’d like to go into filmmaking professionally so I really hope this leads me somewhere.”

1. Actually the EGM results got bumped for this, the Claudia Lawrence stories are still on the front page.
2. When Vision reported on it, it hadn’t been on national TV, which is the point of this article…